Late one night in 1958, a man named Liu Bingshu whispered to his wife, the mother of their four young children, “There is no escape. I could be taken away … If I can come back, we will see each other again.” Liu would soon be the victim of a massive policy change by the Communist leader of China, Mao Zedong. Just a year earlier, Mao had famously demanded that “a hundred flowers bloom,” actively inviting criticism and suggestions from the public. But those who spoke up were soon labeled “rightist” enemies; the party estimated that they amounted to 5 percent of the population. Some half a million intellectuals, including Liu, were ordered to undergo “reeducation.” Thousands were dispatched to three labor camps in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu. The deadliest of them was Jiabiangou, where less than half of the inmates are reported to have survived. Liu’s family never saw him again.

This intimate and devastating nighttime discussion between Liu and his wife has been preserved because Liu’s oldest son, 12-year-old Liu Tianyou, woke up and overheard it, and decades later, in his modest apartment in Gansu, the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming recorded his memory. Ai spent two years interviewing dozens of Jiabiangou survivors as well as the families of victims. She traveled to the former camp site and filmed the shallow graves with skulls still poking out of the sand. In 2017, 60 years after Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Ai released her seven-hour film: Jiabiangou Elegy.

People such as Ai Xiaoming—Chinese filmmakers, writers, and artists, those who are looking to uncover and expose the darkest episodes in China’s history, often at great risk to themselves—are the subject of the long-time China correspondent Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks. Johnson considers these individuals to be engaged in the ancient Chinese tradition of producing yeshi, or “wild history”—accounts of the past that strayed from official dynastic court history, or zhengshi. In the China of today, Johnson contends, this practice continues with a sparse but committed underground insisting on yeshi in the face of a digitally reinforced version of zhengshi.

The Communist government considers the official narratives of the past sacrosanct, and control over them as essential to the maintenance of power. Attempts to challenge any aspect of the accepted history of Communist rule have become particularly dangerous in the past decade, under the rule of Xi Jinping. Johnson himself was among a group of foreign correspondents who were suddenly expelled from the country in 2020, amid the COVID-19 outbreak and growing animosity between the Trump and Xi administrations. Especially at a time of renewed repression, Johnson argues, the fight against collective amnesia is an important front line. The work of these documentarians is to better understand the past, but it has also become “a battleground for the present,” Johnson writes.

In this sense, Johnson’s work is not unlike that of his subjects: They ask their audiences to shift their vantage point and to reconsider an overlooked group or a sanitized past to truly comprehend the country they live in. Johnson captures a range of grassroots historians carrying out this work, including the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, who conducted oral-history interviews in order to piece together the destruction of her native land during the Cultural Revolution, and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, who documented the suffering of peasants in the enduring regional famines in rural Shaanxi province in northwestern China.

Every ideology creates its own origin myths. Mao and his fellow idealists canonized their memory of brotherly love in Yan’an, the Communists’ homebase in the 1930s and ’40s, which in reality was dominated by fierce power struggles punctuated by executions. Americans don’t have to search far to find examples of such airbrushing, like the belief in the unwavering fair-mindedness of the American Founding Fathers, many of whom were slave owners. Recent years have seen a global “memory boom,” Johnson writes, an attempt to correct the record. And in China, this push has its own urgency: The government sees self-reflection and criticism as a form of lethal weakness, justifying its oppressive policies and persecutions. For the country to break free from the cycles of injustice and violence, zhengshi and yeshi have to first make peace.

After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the mid-1950s, which swept up Liu Bingshu and so many others, Mao launched a series of utopian experiments. The Great Leap Forward, a crash industrialization program, soon led to the Great Famine, from 1959 to 1961, in which an estimated 45 million people starved to death. The Cultural Revolution soon followed; Mao, uncertain of his grasp on power, declared that enemies of the regime were preparing for a counterrevolution. In July 1966, he urged students and other young people to attack authority figures around them. The next month, in Beijing alone, more than 1,700 people were killed. The upheaval ended only shortly after Mao’s death, in 1976.

When Deng Xiaoping rose to power as Mao’s successor, he was confronted with the seminal task of reframing the deadly chaos from which the country had just emerged. In 1980, he convened a committee to work on a draft resolution about this turbulent recent history. But Johnson writes that Deng was reportedly livid when the committee submitted its first draft, because he found the criticism of Mao far too blunt. Deng himself had suffered under Mao: He had been purged twice. His oldest son was tortured and had jumped off a building, becoming paralyzed. However, Deng felt that to reject the legacy of the Great Helmsman so thoroughly would undermine the Communist Party’s own legitimacy.

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Ultimately, a more conciliatory version was distributed to a few thousand senior officials that September, triggering complaints that the draft had failed to address the period’s mass fatalities. Deng managed to prevent a full-blown denunciation of his predecessor, and nine months later, the resolution was officially ratified. It acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution was a costly error and blamed it on the “anti-revolutionary” Gang of Four, a faction of party officials who had become notorious during that era. It reaffirmed Mao’s status as “a great leader and mentor,” vaguely concluding that “his contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary.”

President Xi Jinping, who has led the country since 2013, has sanctioned this paving over of difficult history. And he has explicitly pointed to the Soviet Union and what he calls its “historical nihilism” as a cautionary tale. Xi saw the Soviet leadership’s decision after Stalin’s death to allow a degree of criticism of his reign and its bloody repressions as the beginning of the end of Soviet power. The permission to reassess history in this way, Xi believes, opened the floodgates to demands for increased liberalization. To get ahead of this “historical nihilism,” on the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, in 2013, Xi instructed party members to see Mao in his historical context. “We can’t use today’s circumstances,” he said, “to measure our predecessors.”

Over the years, party commentators have echoed Xi’s thoughts. In 2018, the Central Committee journal Qiushi published an article on “historical nihilism” and blamed Nikita Khrushchev specifically for his infamous 1956 secret speech in which he acknowledged some of Stalin’s crimes. Khrushchev “failed to analyze the historical background,” the article argued. “And disproportionately focused on Stalin’s shortcomings and mistakes.” The author also warned against the subversive “information explosion” that the Soviets underwent. In the 1960s, memoirs from victims of Stalin’s Gulags, petition letters, underground journals, and books by dissidents circulated in a period known in the Soviet Union as “The Thaw.” “We must unequivocally oppose and resist historical nihilism,” Xi said at a Central Committee meeting in 2021. The same year, party theorists called on the public to “dare to struggle against” this “historical nihilism,” which one of them said was aimed at “removing the spinal cord” of the Chinese race.

One of the survivors Ai Xiaoming followed in her documentary was Zhang Suiqing, who took it upon himself to erect a tombstone of sorts for his less fortunate Jiabiangou peers. In 2013, he obtained approval from local authorities. When the modest memorial was finally built, the officials changed their minds and had it dismantled. What happened to Zhang’s project is reminiscent of a passage in Georgi Gospodinov’s 2020 novel, Time Shelter, about post-communist Bulgaria. When a character set about trying to build a museum dedicated to the role of the country’s state security, he met endless obstacles: “We don’t want to divide the people,” he was told. “It wasn’t the right moment,” others said. Finally, he gave up, noting, “You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.”

With charming modesty, China experts from the United States and Europe sometimes call themselves “students of China.” Ian Johnson has been “a student of China” in the best sense of this phrase. In his first book about the country, Wild Grass, published in 2004, he traced the possibility of liberalization at the turn of the century, by pursuing—literally, by train and taxi, or down a hallway—underdog figures who became accidental activists as they tackled problems such as police brutality and the overtaxation of farmers.

Those who have read Wild Grass may feel a wistfulness for it while reading Sparks: For many, the hopefulness of the early 2000s has evaporated. The country feels much further away from the sense of potential he was describing then. Johnson’s writing, too, has changed over time, shifting from the conventions of narrative long-form to a more documentarian style. His cast of characters has grown and no matter how brief the appearance is, he diligently notes each person’s name as if he, too, is fending off erasure. The landscape has widened, and he insists that readers see China the way he sees it: how the sprawling geography, history, and people who animate it are intricately intertwined. In Dao County, one of the worst sites of the Cultural Revolution, an elderly man, Tan Hecheng, showed Johnson around. Tan spent four decades researching and documenting the thousands of local killings. At a scenic spot by a local river, he showed Johnson saber marks on the parapet of a bridge—a sickening trace of the executions. Johnson sees not only the physical wounds of the past but also the psychic toll on the historian: “His mind is overloaded with horrific images. As he gets older, they overwhelm him, becoming more real than ever.”

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Authoritarians have an instinct to try to control a nation’s historical memory. This impulse emerges out of fear. They are convinced that their power will be weakened if they allow a more accurate and nuanced vision of the past, worrying that discussions of guilt, accountability, and reparation will be required if they get too far. But such a binary calculation in dealing with a nation’s history is “the opposite of thought,” as the novelist Zadie Smith recently put it in an interview. When Ai Xiaoming’s film was released, she and her subjects were harassed by the authorities. “Aren’t today’s events enough for you to believe the veracity of the Jiabiangou stories?” she asked on WeChat in 2017.

“Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would not have been Tiananmen,” Huang Zerong, who went to prison for publishing an underground journal, told Johnson. In the imprisonment of Huang and the harassment of Ai, the vicious cycle repeats. China’s underground historians use writing like a time shelter: Through manuscripts saved in drawers, informal lectures on tucked-away staircases, and magazines circulated by PDF file to evade the government’s eye, they want to memorialize those who came before them and to deliver a message to the future.